by Alex Miller
My father wanted me to be a writer. He called it being an author. Later, when he and I were no longer friends, he couldn’t have cared less what I did. But at the beginning, when we were close, his eyes used to light up and he’d grab me and say it would be a grand life for me to become an author and that is what I should set my heart on. He was dreaming he was me. He used to take hold of me and say it and then laugh and give me a hug, as if he really believed it would happen. As if believing would make it happen. He had no idea what he was talking about. He was a hall porter in a club somewhere in London’s west end, in Pall Mall or St James, one of those places. He was a lackey. Yes sir, Good morning sir, that sort of thing. His days and nights were filled with that stuff. He had to keep quiet about himself. That was as high as he ever reached, the outer hall. And it wasn’t a matter of pride with him, but he just wasn’t interested in the things the other hall porters were interested in. He didn’t have a bet and he didn’t follow the football. He was an eccentric, and in a hall porter that’s sad. His own father had been lost in the North Sea, in a story that never made sense to me, a story that my father changed with his changing moods.
The idea of his son becoming an author was something to keep his spirits up. When he was old and had given up painting he started picking up secondhand books in the markets and spending his evenings at the dining table repairing their bindings. I never saw him read any of these books. These broken old books stood for something he’d never had. They stood for education. Intellectual freedom. Autonomy. That kind of thing. Refinement. The permission to lead another life. A better life. A secret life that had to be repaired and attended to. Himself in other words. The books stood for a quiet, disciplined, organised, productive life that he’d long ago despaired of. How could he put something like that together? In the end his despair came to fit exactly the volume of these old books. He’d had a terrible beginning in Glasgow. He died surrounded by hundreds of old books. My mother threw them out. She knew they weren’t any good.
‘Where are his books?’ I asked her when I visited her after his death.
‘I threw them out,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand the smell. It was like having him still here.’
She’d repainted the place and hung new curtains at the windows. After her initial distress, his death was a release for my mother. Within a year she’d become one of those happy widows and he’d been all but forgotten.
‘D’you miss Dad?’ I asked her.
She gave me a look, a bit mischievous, and said, ‘Well it’s funny you know, but I don’t.’
There are things that it’s impossible to express with words. Language employed to express emotion is a perversion. The records of commerce is the only honest use of written language. The rest is a cover-up. It’s not words that shape our intuitions. It’s not in what we say but in what we leave unsaid that we reveal the shape of our deepest motives. In the places between the words. In the tacit and the implicit. In the silence beyond words. That’s where we hide our truth. Behind the endless buzzing of language. The sovereignty of silence is its ambiguity. Silence is a power greater than speech.
It always begins with a question. An uncertainty. Then we become wanderers in search of ourselves. This affair of having a portrait painted. Jessica became at once flattered, insecure, vain, unsettled, resisting. She was all at a loss and went off warmed and glowing and scheming how she was going to influence the image of her that I was to bring into being. Not herself.
How it came about was this. Being at the university one day a week I met certain people I wouldn’t otherwise have met and in this way was offered commissions I wouldn’t otherwise have been offered. Within a week of running into her in the corridor on my way to the lift, I was offered a commission for a series of etchings to be published in a scholarly journal associated with the university. The job was the likenesses of ten eminent Australian women to accompany articles on their work and their careers. I got the offer over the phone and I turned it down flat. It didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t need the money. Once I would have grabbed it. But not any more. I wanted to recover. I was exhausted. But the editor of the journal forwarded the details to me through the post anyway.
Her name was on the list: Professor Jessica Keal, Visiting Fellow in the Department of History. I sat there on my high stool next to the solander in the studio staring at her name for several minutes, watching the two of us meeting in the empty corridor, watching a more responsive meeting than the real one had been. Then I made myself a cup of coffee and thought about it some more before ringing the editor of the journal and telling her I’d changed my mind and would accept the commission after all. But I hadn’t really changed my mind about the likenesses. And as soon as I’d put the phone down I wished I hadn’t rung the editor and I nearly rang her again to say I’d changed my mind back again. I thought of pretending someone had impersonated me the first time. I still didn’t want to do the job. I knew what they’d be like, these eminent women. Likenesses. An invasion. And after all I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know whether I might have invented that little pool of trust just to comfort myself. That so-called offer. Maybe it hadn’t really been there at all. Why would it have been there? No doubt she was just being polite. I didn’t trust my memory of the event. We invent these things, we hope so hard for them, especially when we’re tired and low in spirits and in need of reassurance that it hasn’t all come to an end for us. We wake up in the middle of the night and we realise some little miracle has been offered to us during the day. And when it gets light we don’t trust the miracle any more, and we decide we must have imagined it. We know this kind of hope can disable us.
So I’m sitting here on my stool with my pad held out at an angle, resting it on my knees, and I’m doing maybe my twentieth drawing of her. As I finish a drawing I flip the page over and begin a new one. I’m working quickly. She’s sitting across from me on a straight-backed kitchen chair with the vertical lines of the stacks behind her, and she’s facing the big verandah windows and looking out into my garden. She’s wearing an open-necked shirt and jeans. ‘What should I wear?’ she asked over the phone. It’s windy and the light is moving back and forth across her face from the movement of the foliage of the almond tree. I asked her at the beginning of the session if she’d keep perfectly still just for a little while. Now she’s frozen into a profile. It amuses me, this anxiety on her own behalf. She doesn’t want to risk me getting it wrong. Her vanity’s involved. I know she’s not going to look my way and I grimace at her. After a while I ask her to come around and face me. ‘Look straight at me, Jessica,’ I say. ‘A visiting fellow in history. What kind of history?’
She starts telling me what she does. But I’m not following what she’s saying. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Her voice is just a background, something to let her move a bit, with her thoughts and her search for the words. She’s started thinking about history and has forgotten to look her best. This is our first meeting. I’ve taken the likenesses of the other nine women. She’s the last. I don’t muck around with things like this. I grab as much information as I can in one sitting and that’s that. My idea with likenesses is always to get the thing done and to move on to something else. There’s always enough from one session for me to do a passable etching or a linocut. And that’s what I do. I keep it brief.
I’ve nearly finished. She’s been here three hours. An hour longer than any of the others had. We took a break for coffee. While I was getting our coffee she had a bit of a look around the studio, respectful, keeping her distance. And that was it. There’s no sense of anything going on between us. There’s this decision of restraint. Just two professional people getting on with the thing they have to do. That’s the way we’re doing it. But there’s an edginess, as if there might be something else that we’re not dealing with. I can’t be sure whether I’m imagining this. It’s hard to know. No doubt it’s something to do with the delicate physics of desire, which can just as easily become the physics of boredom or revul
sion.
I stop drawing and say, ‘Thanks Jessica. That’s it,’ and I close the pad and put it on the solander behind me. Businesslike. I’m a busy man. We’re both busy people. We don’t want to waste each other’s time. She gets off the stool and stretches and comes over and asks me, ‘Can I have a look?’
I pick up the pad and turn it over, face down. She waits for me to offer it to her. She’s not sure of me. She’s tense. Then it dawns on her.
‘Aren’t you going to let me see?’
She’s a bit incredulous. Her colour has heightened. Her eyes are dark brown and steady and she’s looking at me as if she’s wondering whether I’m a reasonable man or some kind of crank.
‘There’s nothing to see yet,’ I say. I don’t really know anything about her. I’ve finished getting my information for the likeness. That’s all it’s going to be, a likeness. I don’t know the first thing about her. I know less about her now than I did when I walked into the common room where they were having the welcome for her and she looked across the room and we saw each other for the first time. In a way we knew everything about each other then. Now we know nothing. She’ll be out of the studio in a minute and that’ll be that. I might go on having regrets for ever. We’ll nod to each other if we meet in the corridor. ‘Hi,’ we’ll say. ‘How’s it going?’ And there’ll be that awkwardness between us because nothing was ever said.
I put the pad of drawings in the solander and close the drawer.
She stands in front of me and challenges me. ‘Why won’t you let me have a look?’
She’s disappointed. She’s angry with me. She’s eager to see what I’ve done. She thinks she’s been patient and deserves to have a look. That’s why she’s been patient, so she can claim her likeness from me at the end of the session. And there’s her vanity. What have I seen, she’s wondering? The likenesses are hers, that’s what she thinks. She’d be confused, she might even feel misrepresented, if she saw what I’ve done. I’ve taken something from her, however, there’s no getting away from that, and I’ve tucked it away in my solander out of her reach, in a place that’s private to me. Her likeness. She’s looking at me hoping I’ll relent. I can feel how closed my features have become. Not that I mean to be this closed. It’s just the way I am. It’s being an artist that’s done it. Keeping things to myself in case they lose their charge. So I close off. Especially when I’m working. I can’t help it. I wish I could be light and open and friendly. But I can’t do that.
She’s seen it’s no use trying to be angry with someone she doesn’t know and who is this closed. She sees that anger’s not going to work. And I watch her beginning to slide away with this realisation, going away completely, becoming unknown, making up her mind, her small anger turning towards dislike instead of disappointment. She’s beginning to believe she’s been mistaken about me.
‘Well,’ she says, and she smiles, a stiff little smile that suggests the possibility of contempt. ‘Thanks. It was interesting.’
She’s leaving. I’m following her down the steps from the verandah into the garden. She’s on the path and I’m still on the middle step when I say, ‘I’d like to paint your portrait sometime, Jessica.’
I’m looking down at her. She turns abruptly and looks up at me, my words catching her. She’s completely thrown. We look at each other. A big question is in her eyes. It might be too late. Then she looks away, her hand seeking the rail, slipping over the weathered timber, her fingertips lingering against the open grain, both of us looking at her hand, at her fingers playing over the surface of the weathered timber.
I see she knows that a portrait means something big and different and difficult. That it will not be easy. I see she knows that a portrait may fail. That it might be a project between us that fails. Sometime I said, so the thing’s not certain. It hasn’t been locked down. But she’s been taken off-guard. She’s flattered. She’s confused now. Her vanity’s been brought into it again. It’s not over yet. It’s unsettled her and something in her wants to resist the whole business. But she’s already standing a little straighter, beginning to re-imagine herself in her own likeness, testing the thing out, preparing herself, watching a new visualisation of herself coming into being. A full portrait. She’s unsteadied. She’s seeing all the portraits she’s ever seen and she’s wondering which one will be her. And she’s not sure whether she wants to accept these possibilities.
‘A portrait,’ she says, as if this is something she has never considered before. ‘How long will it take?’ She looks concerned as she says this so that I won’t notice that she’s flattered. So that I’ll think she’s worried about finding the time in her busy life to sit for a portrait. She’s pretending not to have understood anything, pretending she doesn’t understand and may not be able to spare her attention for this kind of thing, pretending there’s something here that only a painter would understand about a portrait.
‘I don’t do one picture,’ I say. ‘I do several.’ It’s a warning. I don’t want her to get the wrong idea. ‘Hundreds maybe. Some small, some not so small. And a few big ones. And drawings and etchings and woodcuts. Whatever I need. Photographs. I never know what I’m going to do. I keep several paintings on the go at once.’
She smiles at this, as if I might be teasing her, looking up at me, allowing herself to hope a little that maybe there’s something after all. And I laugh. ‘It’s like that,’ I say. ‘It might take a year. Two years. Who knows?’ A portrait has never taken me two years and I say this knowing it to be a lie. I don’t mean to mislead her. But I find myself lying to her, freely, as if I’m describing something I believe in. I’m describing the future. I don’t know this at the time, of course, but that’s what I’m doing, describing my future practice.
Suddenly she says, surprised and offering an apology, ‘I’ve left my bag in your studio.’
‘Your cigarettes are in it,’ I say.
Everyone has to satisfy their curiosity about the image. They can’t help themselves. If you’re writing they don’t take any notice of you. If you’re writing they leave you alone. But if you’re drawing they have to come and have a look over your shoulder. It’s got something to do with the difference between the image and the word. The image is more primitive, it’s more archaic and more direct and more public than the word. The image belongs to everyone. You can’t keep it private. It jumps at us from ten thousand years ago from rock shelters in Arnhem Land and caves in Europe and from billboards on the side of the highway. When we see a drawing we all think we know what we’re looking at. But the word is private. It’s harder to get at. We’re prepared to be puzzled. The word is more of a secret sign than the image. Antique inscriptions mean nothing to us. We need the genius of Champollion to decipher the Rosetta Stone for us, specialist knowledge, before we get anywhere near the meaning of the word. And it’s a delicate matter. Words are not firmly attached to their meanings. If we’re clumsy and push them too hard their meaning slips out and we’re left with the husk. The empty sign. If we’re writing it could be our diary or a love letter or a shopping list and it’s no one’s business but our own, but if we’re drawing it’s a matter for public concern. Jessica couldn’t understand at first that these preparations belonged to me and were private. If I’d let her see them they’d have changed. They would have become something between us. I didn’t try to explain. Then I surprised myself. I threw her the idea of a portrait before I’d had time to consider what I was saying. And when she’d got her bag and we were back in the studio, the wind whipping through the open door and making her hair blow around her face, she agreed.
I had a view of my garden through the large windows that enclosed the verandah. I’d let the garden grow wild. The previous owners had planted fruit trees. Apples and pears and plums. And the almond tree. So there was this neglected orchard outside my windows where the birds came in the autumn to eat the fruit. Down the hill were the tall Lombardy poplars bordering the reserve, and then the old gum trees they’d left standing.
No one who has a choice chooses to live in Canberra. I’m no exception. I didn’t choose to live in Canberra but I had long ago decided that I’d probably never move away. My wife had been with the Department of Foreign Affairs. That’s why we moved to Canberra in the first place. I was the one who’d stayed. Our son grew up there.
After Jessica Keal had gone that day I stood by the window looking into the garden for a long time. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know why I’d told her I wanted to do her portrait. It was a hot summer afternoon and I could hear children screaming down at the reserve. My house was quieter than usual and the garden emptier. I felt I might be making it all up between us. Just inventing something out of desperation. I was tired. My work was going through a stale patch and I wondered where I was going to get the energy from for this portrait. Even then, however, I detected a kind of intuitive stubbornness in myself about it, a dumb, inarticulate resolution at a great depth, which said there were no arguments and that I was going to go through with her portrait no matter what. This was really the first inkling I had that she was going to change things for me.
My father’s gone of course. Long ago. My mother too now. There’s no one left. They may as well not have existed. My family. It all came to nothing for them. All the passions and hopes and the little dreams and wayward moments. The small repair jobs. It was a piece of music performed once and never repeated. My family. My family history. My life. My life story. I could hardly remember how it went. Now and then a couple of bars would come into my head and I’d struggle to link them up with a larger theme. Something magisterial, grand, portentous, something with a bit of authority and romance in it. But there was nothing. No theme. No sweeping gesture across the homeland. It had left no trace. Hardly any. He said to me one day, ‘That girl came to visit us after you left. Did you know that?’
